Like many of today’s best American independent filmmakers, Aaron Katz makes a virtue of modesty. His first two features, “Dance Party USA” and “Quiet City,” founding works of the mumblecore quasi-movement, are no-budget immersions in the ambivalent lives of their young protagonists. But Mr. Katz’s diffidence is deceptive. Beneath the laid-back drift of his movies are real ambition and depth, a poetic sense of place and a delicate grasp of character.

Initially at least, his third feature, “Cold Weather,” calls to mind other recent quarter-life dramas of indecision and gentle self-absorption. Doug (Cris Lankenau, above, with Robyn Rikoon), a forensic science dropout and Sherlock Holmes buff, has moved in with his sister, Gail (Trieste Kelly Dunn ), in Portland, Ore. (Mr. Katz’s hometown). But just as the film is beginning to sketch the dynamics between these adult siblings, odd elements creep in, as if from another movie: a vanished femme fatale, an abruptly evacuated motel room, a missing suitcase of money, a eureka moment in a library, clues leading to a sleazy Web site and what may be the only palm tree in Portland, even a stakeout and a chase.

Down to its title “Cold Weather” acknowledges that the romance of place is central to the appeal of detective fiction. (Think of Holmes’s London or Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles.) Andrew Reed’s resourceful cinematography soaks in the atmospheric gloom of the Pacific Northwest, and Keegan DeWitt’s striking pizzicato score enhances the lightly ominous mood.

“Cold Weather” thrives on the strange tension and the even stranger harmony between mumblecore naturalism and genre artifice. There’s an element of self-consciousness to the mystery plot — Doug procures a Holmesian pipe as a thinking aid (though he forgets to get tobacco) — but Mr. Katz also takes it seriously, keeping the stakes low and the twists plausible. Far from a beside-the-point MacGuffin, the very presence of mystery suggests a transformative way of taking in the world. In other words, it’s an integral part of Doug’s rite of passage as he goes from looking inward to looking out, seeing new realms of possibility in the people and places around him.

The French term for brothel is “maison close” — literally closed house — and Bertrand Bonello’s “House of Pleasures,” a sumptuous drama about the lives of courtesans in fin de siècle Paris, takes this expression at face value by unfolding almost entirely within the upholstered walls of an upscale bordello called L’Apollonide.

Despite its opium-haze ambience and luxuriant imagery — the gifted cinematographer is Josée Deshaies, Mr. Bonello’s wife — the film remains clear-eyed about the situation of its characters, indentured servants who incur mounting debts to a generally sympathetic madam (Noémie Lvovsky). They may share a sisterly camaraderie, and some have escaped crueler fates, but for these women the threat of violence and disease is ever present — and only getting worse.

The act of savagery that opens and haunts the movie, perpetrated against the prostitute the others call “the Jewess” (Alice Barnole ), amounts to the original sin of the 20th century. Mr. Bonello situates his film at a precise moment in time: what two title cards describe as “the twilight of the 19th century” and “the dawn of the 20th century.” The patrons of L’Apollonide casually invoke the scandals and fads of the day: the Dreyfus Affair, H. G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds,” the brand-new Paris Métro.

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A scene from the essay film "Nostalgia for the Light."Credit
Icarus Films

But time is always in complicated, dreamlike flux in “House of Pleasures,” which circles back and forward and sometimes folds in on itself. A period film reflects not only the time in which it is set but also the historical understanding of the time in which it is made, and Mr. Bonello closes the gap between then and now with, among other devices, anachronistic soundtrack selections: vintage Atlanta R&B over the credits, “Nights in White Satin” for the emotional climax.

At once bracing and romantic, this evocation of an irretrievable past crystallizes a simple truth that has eluded so many other costume dramas: what we think of as history was, for those who experienced it, nothing more or less than life.

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Nostalgia For the Light

Directed By Patricio Guzmán

The Atacama Desert, a cloudless, craggy plateau on the north Chilean coast, is one of the most arid places on the planet, but it proves to be fertile ground for the filmmaker Patricio Guzmán and his career-long project on remembrance as a moral imperative. Since his landmark three-part documentary, “The Battle of Chile” (1978), Mr. Guzmán has been a steadfast chronicler of the occluded horrors of the Augusto Pinochet regime, rallying against what he sees as the convenient amnesia of his still-traumatized country.

His latest essay film, “Nostalgia for the Light,” derives both its metaphysical and its political force from the associations that it forges between those who spend their days digging into the barren Atacama earth and those who spend their nights gazing up at the crystalline sky.

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John Boyega, left, in "Attack the Block."Credit
Liam Daniel/Screen Gems

Its altitude and climate make this edge-of-the-world landscape a rich repository of history in more ways than one. Astronomers, exploiting the transparency of the atmosphere, study unthinkably distant constellations whose light has traveled for eons before reaching us. Archeologists uncover petroglyphs of millennia-old civilizations and ruins of 19th-century mines, preserved in the humidity-free air. And, seeking traces of a more recent but no less shrouded era, women whose loved ones were executed and supposedly buried in the desert during Pinochet’s murderous reign comb the pitiless expanse of sand and rock for human remains.

All these quests, as Mr. Guzmán observes in his ruminative narration, are attempts to reckon with the past, on vastly different scales. The wonder of “Nostalgia for the Light” is how it entwines and juxtaposes these perspectives, shifting telescopically from the immensity of the universe to the vagaries of human memory, reminding us that the calcium in the stars is the very material in our bones. Ultimately it’s a movie that obeys what Mr. Guzmán calls memory’s “gravitational force.” Here, as in many of his films, the past exerts a pull, but it also illuminates the present, and our obligations in the here and now.

The council estate — as the housing project is called in Britain — has always loomed large in British cinema, a brutalist emblem of working-class life in any number of kitchen-sink dramas. This last year alone it served as a backdrop in movies as different as “Tyrannosaur” (a Gothic tragedy), “The Arbor” (a documentary) and “Weekend” (a gay romance).

But this setting has perhaps never been reimagined with the nerve and verve of Joe Cornish’s feature directing debut, “Attack the Block.” Here an imposing but run-down South London tower block — “the endz,” in the parlance of the local teenagers — comes under siege by furry aliens with glow-in-the-dark fangs. “Attack the Block” invites comparisons with another 2011 kids-versus-aliens romp, J. J. Abrams’s Steven Spielberg homage, “Super 8.” But this brisk, scrappy action-adventure owes much less to Mr. Spielberg’s nostalgic child’s-eye view (Mr. Cornish, as it happens, was a writer of Mr. Spielberg’s “Adventures of Tintin”) than to filmmakers like Joe Dante and John Carpenter, who spike their B-movie thrills with tongue-in-cheek subversions and offhand social commentary.

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Mariano Llinás in "Historias Extraordinarias."Credit
Cinema Tropical

Mr. Cornish complicates viewer sympathies by opening with a mugging. A few teenage hooligans, black and mixed race, hold up a young white woman at knifepoint. These thugs turn out to be the film’s heroes (their brooding leader, Moses, is played by John Boyega , above in foreground, surely a future star), and their incensed victim is forced into an uneasy alliance with them when an interspecies turf war breaks out.

It’s too glib to suggest, as some have, that this picture of turmoil in multicultural Britain presaged last summer’s London riots. But while “Attack the Block” never strains for relevance, it shows a keen awareness of its milieu: how race, class and gender govern life in these parts. The way the kids respond to the extraterrestrial threat — with self-sufficient bravado — has everything to do with what they’ve learned to expect. “Feels like just another day in the endz,” one of them says. The secret weapon of this alien-invasion movie is not special effects but social reality.

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Historias Extraordinarias (Extraordinary Stories)

Directed By Mariano Llinás

The most salient thing about the addictive, preposterously ambitious Argentinian film “Historias Extraordinarias” (“Extraordinary Stories”) is that it runs more than four hours: a thicket of stories within stories that follow three main characters over 18 chapters and dozens of subplots involving scores of secondary figures, locations on two continents, multiple cross-pollinated genres, telenovela-ready cliffhangers and a live lion. The second most salient thing is that this elaborate superproduction is proudly homemade: written and directed by Mariano Llinás, right, who also co-starred and composed the de facto theme song, all for the grand sum of $50,000.

The marathon duration is crucial for a movie about the Scheherazade-like seduction of an endlessly unfolding tale. And the microscopic budget helps demonstrate Mr. Llinás’s evident belief that ingenious storytelling is often economical, combining minimum information with maximum insinuation.(Completed in 2008 and the subject of a cult following at home — it played for more than a year at a Buenos Aires cinémathèque — the movie received a belated New York run last spring.)

Scenes with barely any dialogue are blanketed in a conspiratorial voice-over that sometimes wryly anticipates the action (“This is what’s going to happen”) and sometimes subtly undermines it. The three main characters, known only as X, Z and H, never meet, but their circumstances come to mirror one another. One suddenly goes from witness to perpetrator of a crime he doesn’t understand; another is a bureaucrat piecing together the secret life of his dead predecessor; the third gets a job photographing riverside stone markers that someone else seems bent on destroying.

All three, given the task of making narrative sense of situations that lack obvious meaning, are effectively acting out an allegory on the uses and abuses of fiction. Drawing on Argentina’s rich literary heritage — the forking paths of Borges, the hopscotch patterns of Julio Cortázar — Mr. Llinás pulls off the rarest of cinematic feats. “Historias Extraordinarias” is a movie that instills in its characters and viewers alike a deep hunger for stories.

A version of this article appears in print on January 1, 2012, on Page MT8 of the New York edition with the headline: Don’t-Miss Movies You Probably Missed. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe